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Abstract:
The dative alternation has been important in studies of
language production and acquisition because it allows researchers
to study factors that determine choice among alternative
grammatical arrangements, as in (1). Like the passive voice with
respect to the active voice, some researchers have regarded the
double object form (1a) of the dative as more 'marked' or unusual
than the prepositional dative form (1b) (Gropen et al., 1989).
(1) a. John gave Mary a book
b.John gave a book to Mary
Existing data supports this conclusion, as acceptability ratings
of the double object form of the same construction have been shown
to be lower than the corresponding prepositional dative form (V.
Ferreira, 1996). Elaborating on this finding, we will present data
from an acceptability judgement study showing that across verbs,
the acceptability of a construction is related to the frequency
with which the verb in the rated construction appears in that form
(i.e., double object or prepositional dative) in written corpora.
Insofar as these data provide a measure of preference in
comprehension, the double object does not appear to be preferred in
comprehension.
Unlike the acceptability data, however, production experiments
have sometimes revealed a tendency for the double object to be
produced (Bock, 1989). In addition, recent corpora analyses of the
dative in spoken and written forms have all suggested that across
dative verbs, the double object form is more common than the
prepositional dative (Collins, 1995; Herriman, 1995).
We will present data from a language production experiment
showing that the double object is preferred. In this experiment,
subjects provided descriptions of simple scenes that often produce
dative verb descriptions. Like the results for the corpus analyses,
for some common dative verbs like 'give', participants more often
produced the double object form (Ave: 62.2%) than the prepositional
dative form (Ave: 35.9%), suggesting a preference for double
objects in production. These results suggest that preferences in
comprehension may not be tailored to preferences in production.
References
Bock, J. K. (1989). Closed class eminence in language
production.
Cognition,
31, 163-186.
Collins, P. (1995). The indirect object construction in English: An
informational approach.
Linguistics,
33, 35-49.
Ferreira, V. S. (1996). Is it better to give than to donate?
Syntactic flexibility in language production.
Journal of Memory and Language,
35, 724-755.
Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollender, M., Goldberg, R., & Wilson,
R. (1989). The learnability and acquisition of the dative
alternation in English.
Language,
65, 203-257.
Herriman, J. (1995).
The Indirect Object in Present-Day English.
Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
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